Peter Recommends CXXV
“I love the internet sometimes”:
Auto-Tune the News Hits the Billboard Top 100
Watch the videos. The first half of the first one if you haven’t seen it already, then the second one, then go find a dsl line and hug it.
Categories: Electronics
Tony Blair’s Lying, War-Mongering, Money-Grubbing GUILTY CONSCIENCE
The Times – Is giving away £5m a reason for such hatred? By David Aaronovitch
Tony Blair announced he’d give the proceeds from sales of his new autobiography to a veterans charity (a quarter of his net worth, apparently), and this sparked a most incredible reaction. Yesterday a letter was published in the Guardian (natch) calling [...]
Categories: War and Peace
Poor Old Hitch
Vanity Fair – Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.
Say what you [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Somebody Linked to She Who Mustn’t Be
Two Annoying Hollywood Stars Do Top Gear
Well, Cameron Diaz is annoying. Tom Cruise is weird. But mostly he’s weird because he should be so very good. But then he’s weird and that makes him weirder. But when he’s on, he’s very good. Anyway it’s nice to hear this:
The Sunday Times – Jeremy Clarkson talks cars, fighter jets and biscuits with Hollywood [...]
Categories: Sports and Leisure
Journalists Struggling to Cope With This “Democratic” Modern Age
Telegraph – Raoul Moat and the unacceptable face of Facebook
In David Cameron’s clash with Facebook we can see the key cultural question of our time, says Jenny McCartney
So, she goes from describing the elitist but responsible days of old journalism, where:
Letters to newspapers that were full of violent views, or just [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Peeking Over the Paywall
Uh oh:
Michael Wolff – What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?
My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world. The wider implications of [...]
Categories: Business & Media
The Jones Act and Creative Problem Solving in the Gulf Oil Spill
Weekly Standard – Oil Messed Up Anger grows along the Gulf Coast at the Obama administration’s pathetic response to the largest oil spill in U.S. history. By Winston Groom (author of Forrest Gump, among others)
It has been apparent from the outset that the Obama administration had no wish to be responsible for fixing this [...]
Categories: Science and Nature
Your Week In Review, or: The Stuff I Miss Never Watching TV Anymore
NRO – Mark Steyn: The Unengaged President
Only the other day, Sen. George Lemieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, over-manned, and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, [...]
Categories: Politics
The Gulf Is Dying So the President Chooses Window Treatments
OC Register – Mark Steyn: Can Obama plug leak in his support?
What was it all the smart set said about Bush? Lazy and uncurious? Had Obama or his speechwriters chanced upon last week’s fishwrap, they might have noticed that I described the president as “the very model of a modern major generalist,” and [...]
Categories: Politics
The Inverted Pyramid Doing a Fine Job
The opening line from this news story:
A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he ‘mooned’ a group of Hell’s Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a bulldozer.
It’s ruined a bit finding out that the “student” is 26-years-old, but it’s lovely while you still imagine him [...]
Categories: People and Current Events
Northern Ireland Again
Yikes:
The Sunday Times – Return to Bloody Sunday The authors investigated the shootings for The Sunday Times. They reveal how their findings became pivotal to the inquiry. Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson
On Tuesday at 8am, a small band of lawyers, among them Britain’s best and brightest, will enter the Guildhall in Londonderry under what [...]
Categories: War and Peace
From Helen to Troy
Thomas Friedman, who used to write the 411 column for Fox News but who now has a blog for the Hollywood Reporter, writes on Helen Thomas’ resignation:
The New York Times, which did not even mention what was going on previously, now reports the story online. The Times has simply ignored [...]
Categories: Business & Media
Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXV
Half, on Helen Thomas (and face):
Per Dad…. she’d make a train take a dirt road.
Oh man. Oh man.
Categories: Business & Media
Fair and Balanced Exists (Anonymously) At CBS After All
“Anchorman” writes an anonymous letter to his network news bosses:
Dear XXXX, I’m writing for some clarification about how we are supposed to cover the Gaza flotilla story. If we, as a news organization, are supposed to be acting as a public relations arm of Hamas, or Hezbollah, both internationally recognized [...]
Categories: Business & Media
